Chapter 67

Chapter 67
Abigail's POV

I held her eyes, weighing whether this was another performance, another card laid down for her own gain, or something else entirely.

It wasn't.

Evelyn was too far gone for that. There was no calculation left in her face, only exhaustion, and a fear of being cornered. A woman still holding a scheme in her chest would never look like this.

"Believe it or not," she went on, and her voice cracked at the edges. "In seventeen years you never went hungry, and you were never dressed in rags. I'm not saying any of that makes up for anything. But for the sake of those seventeen years, for the fact that I raised you at all — I'm begging you."

Her voice sank lower and lower, until she nearly seemed about to fall to her knees.

"Give her a way to live. Whatever you want, name it. If you'll only say the word, I'll give you anything."

Anything.

Beneath the stillness of my face, my mind had already begun to race.

This was exactly what I wanted.

She stood before me weak, desperate, ready to give anything — and I was not going to waste the chance. This wasn't charity. It was a transaction — one that I set the price for.

I watched her in silence for a moment before I finally spoke.

"Since you say you'll give anything, then let's do it differently." My voice was soft. "I can plead for Olivia before the council. But before that, you have to give me something first, in exchange."

Her head snapped up, and in her eyes there was a flash of desperate, last-ditch hope.

"What? Name it."

"Three questions," I said. "Answer honestly. If I catch you in even one lie, a single word, the deal is off. And before the council, I won't say a word on her behalf."

She nodded at once, over and over, fast as a drowning man clutching at a rope thrown out across the water.

"First question." I kept my voice level. "Who is my mother?"

Evelyn shut her eyes.

She kept them shut for a long time, so long I almost thought she would refuse. But when she finally spoke, her voice was so low it was barely a breath.

"Celeste Bennett."

That name struck a heavy blow somewhere deep in my chest. It felt as though an unseen hand had closed hard around my heart.

Bennett.

The Alpha King's name.

My mother had once carried the Alpha King's name.

The loose threads I had gathered up and set aside came rushing at me all at once: the faint, unnameable warmth in Elias's eyes when he looked down at me from his high seat; the birth records in the archives scrubbed clean, not even a witness or a place left behind; and Harper's gentle, immovable refusal to tell me the truth.

All of it, the pieces I had carried all this time without understanding, suddenly swung toward one another, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

But I only gave a small nod of my chin.

"Go on."

I looked at her and asked the second question.

"Who is my father?"

She shook her head, and this time there was no hesitation in it at all.

"I don't know. Matthew never told me. He only said your blood was very special, and that I was to take good care of you."

I watched her hands, her shoulders, the set of her jaw, reading every small response.

Seven parts honest.

Her tension hadn't spiked at the question. If she had been hiding something there, that tension would have shot up like a tongue of flame. But it didn't.

She genuinely didn't know.

"Third question." I leaned forward. "Why was I fostered with the Crimson Fang Pack?"

"I was already married to Matthew when you came here." Her voice was steadier than a moment before, as though giving up the truth had loosened something in her chest. "You were about a year old. He told me a person of the highest rank, someone extremely noble, had placed you in his keeping to raise. As for why you had to be hidden here, why that person didn't keep you themselves — he never explained."

She paused, and her voice dropped.

"He only said, this child must not, under any circumstances, come to any harm."

I watched her quietly.

"Who was that noble person?"

She hesitated for an instant.

Just a single breath's time.

Then she shook her head.

"That's three questions asked."

I didn't press her.

No need.

Celeste Bennett.

And a person of the highest rank, who had given me away in secret, and demanded that I be kept safe at all costs.

Laid side by side, the two pieces made the answer plain as day. Saying it out loud would only have been redundant.

I drew a slow breath and stood.

"I'll ask the council for mercy."

Now I looked down at her from above, my voice soft, but every word cut clean and clear.

"But hear me."

"First. Olivia is exiled from the Crimson Fang Pack for good, stripped of every rank and every protection. That is the floor. There is no room to bargain below it."

"Second. From tonight on, you never again use the words 'I raised you for seventeen years' to bind my hands. Because you and I both know exactly what you did to me in those seventeen years."

I paused, and let the cold settle fully into my gaze.

"Third. If Olivia, once she's cast out, ever turns her mind against me again, there will not be a second warning. And you would do well to remember that too."

Evelyn's face had gone white as bone.

Her lips moved, but no sound came out. At last she pushed herself up on her shaking legs, barely gathering what little dignity she had left, and stumbled out through the flap into the dark.

Only when she was gone did I let myself breathe.

I let my hand tremble there in the shadows, because now there was no one left to see it.

Celeste Bennett.

My mother.

A woman I had never laid eyes on, a woman who had carried the King's name.

Who was she?

Why did she die?

What had her face looked like?

Had she... loved me?

What rose in me at that moment was not anger, and not that familiar, hard drive for revenge.

It was a want plain and childlike.

The want to have been loved.

In my last life, I had thought I had parents, and they had burned me alive with their own hands.

In this one, I knew I had been given away. But at least I had a mother named Bennett; at least someone of a noble hand had been watching over me in secret.

I wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to see Nicholas.

Not to plan, not to report.

Just to stand beside him, and in the steady presence of him, feel something real and safe.

But I held myself back.